You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand this. You just need to know that Trump, like every president before him, swore an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” (That oath is found in the Constitution at the end of Section 1 of Article II.)

Now, is there anyone out there who’s prepared to argue, seriously and sincerely, that Dolt 45 has faithfully executed the office? Or that he has worked to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution? Not only has he failed to do so, he has deliberately attempted to do otherwise.

Indeed, hundreds, nay thousands, of contrary examples exist in the public record. The House hearings could go on for years if they attempted to be comprehensive.

The Constitution, in Article II, Section 3, also requires the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” I think creating and artificially extending a government shutdown is not taking care that the (spending) laws be faithfully executed. I imagine it wouldn’t take much to convince a House majority of that, either.

That is what the House should do. It doesn’t need to wait for Robert Mueller, and it shouldn’t. Speaker Nancy Pelosi should direct House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler to open those hearings at once, amass evidence of Trump’s malfeasance, and issue articles of impeachment for the full House to consider.

Buzzfeed reports that special counsel Robert Mueller has documentary evidence that Donald Trump ordered his attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. If that’s true, Trump must be impeached immediately.

Donald Trump committed his first impeachable offense on his first day in office and has continued it daily since: profiting personally from his D.C. hotel, to which his supporters here and abroad flock, in violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. He did it right out in the open, where everyone could see it, no investigation required.

And there are varying degrees of proof in the public record that he has committed other arguably impeachable offenses, too, including but not limited to suborning perjury, money laundering, sedition (if not treason), and so on.

Since May 2017, special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, as well as such possibly related issues as money laundering.

Trump was able to do what he did because for the first two years of his term, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. They would neither hold Trump accountable nor allow Democrats to do so.

That changed on Nov. 6, when Democrats scored a victory not seen since the immediate aftermath of Watergate. Incoming Democratic House committee chairs vowed that Trump would undergo oversight.

As I say, Trump has been guilty of at least one impeachable offense since Day 1. And I believe he should be impeached, on that charge and others. But up until this morning, I had been (grudgingly) content to await the results of the Mueller investigation and/or any reports from the House investigating committees before Congress started discussing that.

And there’s a reason for that: Impeachment, a remedy included in the Constitution by the Framers, is an inherently political act. Other than treason and bribery, the Constitution doesn’t say what an impeachable offense is, with the practical result that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives thinks it is. Accordingly, I thought that for any impeachment effort to have much public support, it should be based on the findings of Mueller and/or the House. After all, when Republicans outran public support for their investigation of Bill Clinton in 1998, they paid heavily for it in that year’s midterms.

That changed this morning, when I read the Buzzfeed report that Mueller has documentary evidence that Trump ordered his attorney Michael Cohen to lie under oath to Congress about when negotiations on the proposed Trump Tower Moscow ended. Indeed, Cohen wasn’t even a source for the story. Mueller obtained the documentary evidence first and then went to Cohen for confirmation, which Cohen provided.

Directing another person to commit perjury — “suborning perjury” — is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine. Not only that, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Robert Barr, whose confirmation hearings were held this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, testified in response to questions from both Republican and Democratic senators that for the president to suborn perjury would definitely constitute a crime. (I’m not entirely sure Barr knows what he’s getting into here, and I’m very sure he’s not up to the task and might even be compromised, but that’s a subject for another post.)

Suborning perjury was the first thing mentioned in Richard Nixon’s articles of impeachment. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that if in fact the Buzzfeed report is true, the House needs to be drafting articles of impeachment immediately.

Is the Buzzfeed article true? To be fair, we don’t know. It was sourced to two unnamed federal agents. The reporters said they had seen some of Mueller’s documentary evidence, but they could not obtain and publish copies. At this writing, no other news outlet has independently confirmed the report that I know of.

On the other hand, Buzzfeed, although a new-media upstart, is a credible and professional news outlet — so credible and professional that it was a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting for what the Pulitzer board called its “stunning probe across two continents that proved that operatives with apparent ties to Vladimir Putin have engaged in a targeted killing campaign against his perceived enemies on British and American soil.” And Jason Leopold, the lead reporter on the piece, is well-regarded as a “ninja” in the business for the ways in which he has used the federal Freedom of Information Act to expose government wrongdoing. (Yes, Buzzfeed catches crap for publishing listicles and other eye candy — but that’s how it pays for investigative reporting. For the record, in 25 years in newspaper I didn’t work for a single paper that didn’t pay for the investigative work with sports, comics, and horoscope, and I don’t recall anyone complaining.) So while we don’t know whether the article is accurate, I think its accuracy is far more likely than not. And if it is accurate, that gun is as smoking and hot to the touch as they come.

Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has said that his committee will be investigating the allegation. Ideally, Mueller will share at least enough of his documentation with Schiff to provide a basis for a referral to the Judiciary Committee for impeachment. And once that happens, Judiciary needs to roll out articles of impeachment and the House needs to pull the trigger.

We are in the midst of the longest government shutdown on record, and it is 100% the responsibility of Donald Trump and the Republicans. The House has passed measures to end it. The Republican-controlled Senate even passed a spending bill 100-0 that Trump rejected after conservative propagandists Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh criticized it. Since then, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell has not allowed another Senate vote. Trump and McConnell are holding 800,000 federal employees and an untold number of private contractors hostage over Trump’s plan to build a wall on the country’s southern border — a wall that, at this writing, almost 60% of Americans say they oppose. If the shutdown continues much longer, it may well push the country into a recession.

This presidency is on fire. This country is on fire. Given what we learned today, we cannot wait any longer. The House needs to go ahead and impeach Trump for suborning perjury; the Mueller investigation and House committee investigations should continue their investigations, but we can’t afford to wait for them anymore. Impeach Trump. Now.

The comedian was speaking to the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner in April 2006 — to the audience in general, but to President George W. Bush, whose poll numbers by then were low, in particular. Colbert said:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying that this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Even then, people were getting news from comedians as well as traditional print and online news sources — and even then, if you live in reality, you had to admit that the comedians frequently provided a … well, less distorted version of objective reality than the traditional news sources.

Only here’s what I think sometimes happened. I think conservatives heard that line and took it literally. Frankly, not much else explains both the behavior of Donald Trump and the Republican Party leadership and the more or less unbudging support for Trump of roughly 37% of the population (although we learned today, from multiplesources, that that number might, finally, be slipping). They’ve shown an aversion to reality that, frankly, is hard (though not impossible) to explain any other way.

And all kidding aside, that aversion to reality can have and is having dangerous effects on the world, our country, and us personally. Only reality-based solutions to problems are likely to work.

Global warming is a huge threat to civilization, and the experts in that field say we have roughly 10 years left to make the significant changes needed to reduce the threat. Republicans mostly oppose any effort to do anything about it. That’s a step up; not so long ago most refused even to acknowledge that global warming existed.

In terms of economics, Republicans have been peddling fantasy for 40 years. No, tax cuts generally never pay for themselves, and big tax cuts on the highest earners in our country not only haven’t paid for themselves, let alone delivered the economic growth that was promised, they’ve also had the effect of funneling wealth up from the working class and middle class to the already very wealthy. I think it’s fair to say that Republicans know their tax policy is fantasy; they just don’t care.

And their policies in areas from health care to the environment are not fact-based, either, and pose the risk of tens of thousands of additional premature American deaths every year.

It is hard to believe that there are still people around who think that both major political parties in the United States are the same and that they are equally bad. But I ran into one today.

Truth is, they’re not, and here’s some proof:

One and only one party has relied on appeals to bigotry, with decreasing subtlety, for more than 50 years.

One and only one party supports a fact-free economic and tax policy, one that further enriches the already very rich mainly by hoovering up what remains of the wealth of the middle class and the working class.

One and only one party has made torture an instrument of national policy.

One and only one party wiretapped its own citizens without a warrant in felony violation of the law and then, when the news became public, retroactively changed the law to escape punishment.

One and only one party wants to funnel money to for-profit prisons.

One and only one party denies the existence of anthropogenic global warming.

One and only one party supports energy policies that will make global warming worse, not better, even as scientists say we have roughly 10 years, at best, to do some pretty drastic things just to level it off.

One and only one party is imprisoning children at the border.

One and only one party is pushing to reduce LEGAL immigration by 50%, which would be economic suicide.

One and only one party is working actively to weaken our international economic and military alliances and gutting our State Department.

One and only one party is tolerating more than 30,000 firearm deaths per year, many of them absolutely preventable.

One and only one party is just fine with Saudi Arabia assassinating a U.S. journalist.

One and only one party is acting as an agent, or at least an asset, of a hostile foreign power.

I could go on, but I hope you get my point: Both parties are not the same. Republicans are demonstrably worse for the country than Democrats and have been since no later than 1992 and arguably since the early 1960s. Anyone who says the two parties are equally bad is lazy, ignorant or lying. There’s no other option.

Ignore anything and everything you read about a presidential candidate’s “likability,” particularly if that candidate is a Democratic woman. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin left office Thursday with an honest-to-God favorability rating of 12%. During gardening season, actual cowshit is more popular.

On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts became the first Democrat to announce that she was forming a 2020 presidential-campaign exploratory committee. And just like that, the political press served notice that it was going to be just as sexist and idiotic as it had been in 2016.

Politico, whose reporting frequently is essential but whose analysis and opinion seems to be at least 50% pro-Republican horseshit, popped up noon Monday with “Warren Battles the Ghost of Hillary,” which suggested that Warren might be just as “unlikable” as Hillary Clinton had been in 2016 and therefore doomed as a candidate.

The anti-Elizabeth Warren narrative was written before the Massachusetts senator even announced she was exploring a presidential run.

She’s too divisive and too liberal, Washington Democrats have complained privately. Her DNA rollout was a disaster — and quite possibly a White House deal-breaker. She’s already falling in the polls, and — perhaps most stinging — shares too many of the attributes that sank Hillary Clinton.

In the year of the woman, it adds up to one unwelcome mat for the most prominent woman likely to be part of the 2020 field. But it also presents an unmistakable challenge: How does Warren avoid a Clinton redux — written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground?

Man, there is so much horseshit here that you probably would need dynamite to unpack it.

First of all, how is it that there is any “anti-Elizabeth Warren narrative” at all just hours after her announcement? Answer: People have been lying in wait for her for a while. And who would do that? People who are anti-Elizabeth Warren. Duh. There is no organic “anti-Elizabeth Warren narrative” at this point, only propaganda.

And how is it that there is an “anti-Elizabeth Warren narrative” that is similar to Hillary Clinton’s? After all, Hillary Clinton has been in the public eye for 35 brutal years, whereas five years ago most Americans had no idea who Elizabeth Warren was. Answer? Sexism: The implicit message of this comparison is that no female candidate, or at least no Democratic female candidate, can be trusted.

Too divisive? How? How does one quantify “divisive”? Sophisticated polling can sort of, kind of get at that — more on that in a bit — but as of Monday, not very much had been done on Warren, and certainly nowhere near as much as has been done on Clinton.

Too liberal? First, there’s always the tiresome and mostly unanswerable question of how one defines “liberal.” And if you can’t define that, how does one quantify how much liberalism is enough vs. too much? And “too much” on what scale? An ideological scale? As opposed to other candidates? Of course, Warren being the first, there were no other candidates when this piece was written.

And who are these “Washington Democrats” who call her too divisive and liberal? I may have spent my career with daily newspapers and their admittedly stodgy websites rather than online creations of the Kewl Kids, but we didn’t let political opponents snipe at each other anonymously, for good reason: It isn’t ethical, and even more importantly, it adds nothing to the reader’s understanding. Half-competent journalists should make political opponents call one another out by name, with all agendas out where the public can see them. That enhances reader understanding, which is, or ought to be, the point of it all.

Warren’s “DNA rollout” was a forthright response to a libelous criticism from a sitting president of the United States. To call it a “disaster” is pure editorializing: I am in no way an expert on this, but to the extent that Native Americans themselves have criticized her for having had her DNA tested, they appear to be privileging custom over science, arguing that without her name on a tribal roll, a DNA test means nothing. (If I’m missing something on this point, I’m happy to be corrected.) In any event, given Donald Trump’s apparently being an agent of a hostile foreign power, his tax fraud, his serial violations of the Emoluments Clause, his history of serial sexual assault, to be suggesting that a DNA test fatally damages a candidate for president is to display both practical ignorance and moral stillbirth. I am somewhat sympathetic to the argument that her timing, during the Blue Wave, suggests she put self ahead of party, but 1) absent additional information that is hardly the only explanation, and 2) If you’re going to make putting self ahead of party a criterion (and you should), there are far greater offenders. Bernie Sanders and Corey Booker come immediately to mind.

“Shares too many of the attributes that sank Hillary Clinton”? And what are they, pray tell? An electoral college founded in not just slavery but also in cosseting the whiny, bitchy, gimme attitudes of the slave states? A grossly bigoted electorate? Enemies in the Kremlin? Republican vote-suppression efforts in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina? Third-party candidates secretly supported by the Russians? Because those are the “attributes” that sank Clinton. By 65 million to 62 million, American voters favored her.

And that’s just three paragraphs. Holy shit. The piece goes on for many paragraphs more, laden with sexism and editorializing and almost unburdened by fact, all predicated on the notions that likability is real, that it matters, that it can be quantified, and that Elizabeth Warren has less of it than other Democrats and perhaps even less than Trump.

And that’s just one candidate. Multiply this bullshit across the dozen-plus likely 2020 Democratic presidents, candidates, many of them women, and you would be forgiven the urge to burn down every single U.S. news outlet.

Well, here are some facts.

“Likability” is incredibly subjective. It cannot be quantified or measured except in the most relative of terms. It is subject to pollution from bias, from lack of information, from lack of context. The closest we can quantifiably get to it is the favorability/unfavorability ratings of polls. The same recent Quinnipiac University poll that scored Warren’s favorability/unfavorability ratings at 33%/37% scored Donald Trump’s at 39%/52%, and yet somehow Warren’s “unlikability” gets all the attention.

And if you Google likability with respect to politicians, you’ll find that the subject comes up WAY more often in articles about women than in articles about men. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not a good one.

And here’s another fact, even more to the point:

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin left office Thursday with an honest-to-God favorability rating of 12%. During gardening season, actual cowshit is more popular. And yet our news media are convinced that Elizabeth Warren 1) is unlikable and 2) cannot be elected president because of it. That ought to adjust your attitude regarding any “analysis” you read about Democratic candidates for the rest of the 2019-2020 election cycle for offices at any level.

So what to do about it? I covered politics for 25 years, some years better than others, so here are my modest suggestions for consumers of news in general and people wondering which Democratic presidential candidate to support in particular:

For now, DO NOTHING. The actual voting doesn’t begin for another 13 months. As of this writing, Warren has formed an exploratory committee and Washington Gov. Jay Insbee has said he intends to. No one else is even close to being a formal candidate. If you were utterly undecided on a candidate a week or a month ago, there is no reason for you to even think about picking a candidate until 1) everyone who is going to run has formally announced and filed their paperwork, and 2) at least some of the Democratic presidential debates, which start in June, have come and gone. You can wait at least six months without sacrificing a thing, and unless you have some kind of personal attachment/connection to a candidate, you probably want to see how the candidates perform in several debates before picking one to support.

At least until the number of remaining Democratic presidential candidates is reduced to two, avoid the temptation to criticize a candidate or candidates you do not support. Instead, talk up the candidate you favor. Send him/her money. Find a way to volunteer for his/her campaign, even if it’s only making phone calls.

Whether you are talking up your candidate or talking down an opponent, do so with both factual and contextual accuracy. That’s harder than it sounds. You might mean quite well, but there are many, many sources of misinformation on the Web with respect to every declared candidate and plenty of potential ones. The Russians messed with what you saw on social media in 2016 and are likely to do so again in 2020. And conservative “news” outlets frequently take bullshit rumors that originate on conservative message boards and give them a patina of legitimacy, so be particularly careful not to amplify that bullshit. Check and double-check the information you choose to use. Factcheck.org and Politifact.com are excellent sources for vetting information, as is Snopes.com.

(And what do I mean by “contextual accuracy”? Remember that nothing happens in a vacuum. Where numbers are concerned, remember that one number is meaningless without at least one other number as a scale. Where facts about a political candidate are concerned, ask questions like, “What other candidate(s) is this fact true about, and to what extent?” Be wary of claims like “first,” “greatest,” “best” or “worse”: As one of my old editors used to say, there’s always a faster gun. Even mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post that are generally reliable with regard to factual accuracy frequently commit mistakes and omissions with regard to contextual accuracy. One big example: The Times’s 2016 focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails — yes, she made mistakes, but she did not commit a crime — while ignoring, for another two years, a long string of evidence that Donald Trump was a crook. And when a news outlet purports to examine any candidate’s “likability,” examine their methods for quantifying it and see to what extent they attempt to assess all candidates or likely candidates in the same manner.)

So, to sum up, I don’t like “likability,” and you shouldn’t either. At this point in the race, and pretty much from now until November 2020, news outlets should be focusing primarily on candidates’ policy proposals — what they are, how they will work, what they will cost, how we will pay for it, and what their outcomes are likely to be. And if the news outlets on which you rely try to dabble in it, hammer them hard. It’s just a pity Facebook doesn’t offer a “don’t like” button.

P.S.: One more thing about likability. George W. Bush won in 2000 because a lot of reporters thought he was “the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with.” Screw that. On both literal and metaphoric levels, I am realistic enough to know that I will never have a beer with even a former president of the United States, let alone a sitting one. So I will vote for a competent, empathetic jackass over a charming sociopath for any office, any day. You can ask the people of Iraq and Puerto Rico and Flint what we get when we elect sociopaths.

One of the nation’s top public universities says a sorority that requires its members to study at least 25 hours a week is hazing. That university needs to go back to school.

Before I started college, back when the Wright Brothers were pups, my parents explained that I should literally look at college academics as a full-time job, one requiring 40 to 50 hours per week: If I was going to be in class, say, 15 hours a week, then I needed to be putting in at least another 25 to 35 hours reading, studying, writing papers, doing labs, etc. THEN I could think about eating and sleeping, and THEN I could think about fun. (As it happened, I ended up adding 40 hours of radio work per week to that whole schedule, with significant impingement on both sleep and fun, but I also graduated with student-loan debt that was merely manageable, so that worked out OK in the end.)

So, I’ll be honest: I’m having a difficult time seeing how a University of Virginia sorority could be suspended by the university for hazing simply for requiring its members — not just pledges — to study 25 hours per week. Yet that’s what happened; the university’s chapter of the Latina sorority Sigma Lambda Upsilon (also known as Senoritas Latinas Unidas) was suspended for just that. A pledge filed a complaint, and after an investigation (or an “investigation”), the university suspended the chapter in March. The sorority filed suit in U.S. District Court in September, alleging its First and 14th Amendment rights had been violated.

In principle, at least, I think the suspension was nuts. That said, I can see how any time/place/manner requirements might be burdensome, depending on what they were. The article didn’t discuss those requirements, so I had a lot of questions. For example:

Did the sorority require its members all to do their 25 hours of studying at the same time each week (e.g., 7-midnight Sunday-Thursday nights) rather than allowing each member to slot her 25 hours into her schedule wherever it fit best around classes, labs, and jobs?

Were the members required to do their studying at the sorority house or some other defined location, rather than in locations of their choice — their rooms, or the library or lab?

How, and how invasively, did the sorority track the study hours of its members?

Was the 25-hour requirement waived or adjusted proportionately for members who were part-time students?

“any action taken or situation created on Grounds [university property — Lex] that is intended to or does produce mental or physical harassment, humiliation, fatigue, degradation, ridicule, shock or injury.”

Again, absent some very weird time/place/manner requirements, I’m having a hard time seeing how a study requirement could cause the kind of problems described in that definition. Moreover, the sorority correctly argues that many other campus organizations have similar requirements. For student-athletes, the Daily Progress notes, NCAA rules limit team-related activities to 20 hours a week, but that doesn’t include things such as study halls, tutoring and travel.

The sorority argues that it is being discriminated against because its members are Latina. The articles don’t suggest that there is any evidence that that is the case, but the facts as reported certainly seem to suggest that 1) the chapter is being treated differently from other student organizations — for whatever reason — and 2) there’s no legal or administrative basis for the suspension. Hell, I think students could only benefit if more student organizations, particularly Greek social organizations, imposed similar requirements.

One last note about this case: The lawsuit was filed in September, but we’re only now hearing about it. That fact likely speaks to the dramatic cuts in news reporting ranks over the past several years. In most metro areas and in many smaller markets, court reporters used to check civil-court dockets at least weekly for suits involving, at the least, prominent plaintiffs and/or defendants — the city or county or local colleges or hospitals or large employers, say. Clearly, the Daily Progress is no longer able to make those kinds of checks, and God knows it’s not alone in that.